Posts by Neil Petersen

Here’s an application of virtual reality you probably haven’t heard of yet: reducing people’s fear of death. Recently, a team of researchers from Barcelona and London collaborated to simulate out-of-body experiences using virtual reality. They found that virtual out-of-body experiences (OBEs for short) can make people less afraid of death but that some virtual OBEs…

From lowering your risk for depression to raising your level of psychological wellbeing, self-compassion has been shown to have a powerful impact on mental health. And according to a new study, you can add “making men more open to seeking mental health treatment” to the list of self-compassion’s positive effects. In recent years, many researchers…

Ever wonder how you ended up with the friends you have? Well, you aren’t the only one – several psychologists have asked this same question, and tried to answer it with scientific studies. Generally, it appears that people choose tend to choose friends with similar personality traits. For example, a recent survey of 46,483 people…

People who move to a new place are often torn between assimilating to their new culture and staying in touch with their old one. Several studies suggest, however, that you can have your cake and eat it too. Not only that – walking the line between multiple cultures may actually confer several psychological benefits. For…

Ounce of prevention, pound of cure, all that. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could treat psychiatric disorders by preventing them? Recently, an international team of researchers did a test run of an intervention designed to do exactly that. In their study, they conducted both an internet version and an in-person group version of an…

It’s common knowledge that New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken, but you don’t know the half of it. Studies looking at how people’s renewed commitments to healthy living tend to play out come January have found some disturbing trends. Take some research done a few years ago at Cornell University. It analyzed food…

We all know that we can’t choose when we fail, only how we react to failure when it does happen. But what’s less clear is why some people are better at brushing off mistakes than others. In a paper titled Resilience to Emotional Distress in Response to Failure, Error or Mistakes: A Systematic Review, psychologists…

Math and science learning isn’t just something that happens in the classroom. Several new studies have confirmed that children’s parents and home environment play an important role in shaping math and science skills. In fact, home and school learning seem to reinforce each other so that kids who learn about math and science outside of…

One of the paradoxes of gambling is that losing can make people want to keep playing as much as winning. All losses are not created equal, though. Several studies published recently in the Journal of Gambling Studies suggest that near misses, losses that are so close to being wins, are especially important in motivating people…

Meditation is an increasingly popular mental health tool, and if you’ve heard about any of the recent research suggesting several health benefits to meditation, you might have been tempted to try meditating yourself. Maybe you’ve even wanted to go all-out and sign up for a meditation retreat. If a little meditation here and there is…